Armor-Piercing Question: After Dracula tells Jonathan the reason for him being an Over Protective Dad, Jonathan suggests humans today might accept the monsters. Dracula then asks him if it's a guarantee that everyone will instantly accept them, to which Jonathan has no answer. The answer ends up being yes.

Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Dracula tells a scary story to little Mavis about a human who hunts down a group of monsters and burns their clothes, bites their toes and... takes their candy. Of course, being a small child at the time, Mavis thinks candy-stealing is the scariest thing ever.

Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Wayne and Wanda are a suburban werewolf couple who don't wear shoes, since it would be redundant for their furry feet.

Batman in My Basement: Inverted. Dracula has to keep the fact that Jonathan is human a secret from the other monsters.

Bat Out of Hell: Subverted with Dracula and Mavis. They both turn into mega-adorable ones.

Dracula: Don't give me the pouty bat face.

Beam Me Up, Scotty!: In-universe, Drac is embarrassed at how twisted humans presented the image of vampires into. We equate vampires as being blood-thirsty and saying "Blah bleh blah!" to which he states he had never said anything like that in his centuries-long life and has no idea where that even came from. Even Mavis thinks he talks like this. He then sees Twilight.

Dracula: This is how we're represented. Unbelievable.

Bedsheet Ghost: The table cloths in the ballroom are all animated bedsheets, and they can make the tables fly.

Dracula gags the shrunken head hanging on Mavis’s door after she won't shut up about what an idiot he's been.

Quasimodo ties up Johnny and tries to bring him to the kitchen in order to make a meal out of him.

Boy Meets Ghoul: Jonathan meeting Mavis kicks off the core love story of the film. Although she at first believes him to be a monster, she is not at all fazed when she finds out the truth.

Break Her Heart to Save Her: Dracula convinces Jonathan his relationship with Mavis would never work out and could even put her life at risk. When she finds out Jonathan's human and still wants to be with him, he rejects her.

Chekhov's Gunman: Winnie's ability to sniff out anything is used at the climax to find Jonathan.

Control Freak: Dracula believes that one can only have fun if it's properly scheduled and executed. His friends put up with this, although they are clearly exasperated at him from time to time. This could count as Fridge Brilliance, because classical vampires had OCD as one of their weaknesses.

Covers Always Lie: The poster features The Invisible Man wearing clothes, but he doesn't wear anything but his glasses throughout the film. Presumably it's to make it more obvious to the audience that there's an Invisible Man there.

Crash-Into Hello: Jonathan and Mavis meet when he crashes into her on an out-of-control flying witch's broomstick. This is a deliberate echo of how Mavis's parents met, colliding as bats.

Creative Closing Credits: In two parts. First, all the characters are animated in 2D style, then the rest of the credits are concept art for the backgrounds.

Creepy Family: Several of the monsters have their own nuclear family, most notably the Wolfman (a wife and several cubs) and of course Dracula, his daughter and late wife. The sequel has the next generation with Mavis, Jonathan and their son.

Mavis for Dracula, lampshaded by the song he sings to her as a child. Now, since she wants to leave home so much, she seems to have grown out of that phase.

Wayne's only daughter, Winnie, is the only one of his children to respect him.

Dark Is Not Evil: Probably one of the most blatant examples ever put on the screen, as it's apparent that monsters don't go out looking for trouble with humans, and are kind of freaked out by them. Except the Evil Chef, whose first impulse is to cook the human intruder.

Dating What Daddy Hates: Dracula doesn't approve of Mavis being with Jonathan, for obvious reasons. However, Jonathan is disguised as a monster when their romance starts, so Mavis doesn't know he's human at the time.

Deadpan Snarker: Dracula. Griffin gets quite a few zingers as well. The shrunken head on Mavis's bedroom door does nothing but snark at Dracula.

Defensive "What?": During the Race for Your Love climax, Wayne clears a line of sheep off the road by eating them up in two seconds flat. As the others look at him horrified, he says "What? Now there's no sheep on the road."

Dracula explains the whole purpose of the hotel to which Jonathan sums it up in one sentence to Dracula's displeasure:

Dracula: It’s a place I built for all those monsters out there lurking in the shadows, hiding from the persecution of humankind. A place for them and their family to come and be themselves, a place void of torches, pitchforks and angry mobs! A place of peace, relaxation, and tranquility... Jonathan: Cool, so it like a hotel for monsters? Dracula: Yes, exactly, a hotel for monsters. Way to sum it up.

During a scene when Dracula and Jonathan are doing an impression of Wayne, Drac explicitly tells Jonathan that it's less funny if he explains the jokes.

Wayne: Hey, kids! Reel it in! You're only supposed to make Mom and Dad miserable!

Easily Forgiven: Even though he broke her heart, Mavis easily forgives Jonathan when he explains why. Probably by shifting her anger to her father for basically threatening to kill Jonathan if he didn't. Which was also easily forgiven because she knows how much of a control freak he can be.

Expy: The relationship between Dracula and Jonathan are not too dissimilar to that of Herman Munster and Grandpa Dracula from The Munsters. Grandpa and the Count are both based off of the Universal Studios adaptation of Dracula, each having a knack for invention (Grandpa's inventions, the Count's intricate Hotel) and a mild contempt for his son in law (Herman and Jonathan). Herman and Jonathan are both dim-witted, innocent and loving to their family. Where as Herman is based off of the Universal Studios incarnation of Frankenstein, Jonathan's "Jonnystein" identity is based off of Frankenstein in-universe. In the sequel, he becomes the son-in-law of Count Dracula and the father of his grandson, just like Herman. They are both prone to scheming with one another behind Lily/Mavis's backs with varying reactions from them and with varying success.

Eye Glasses: Griffin has expressive frames. His eyeballs are invisible, just like the rest of him.

Eye Scream: Dracula considers Jonathan's attempt to remove his contacts to be this.

Face Palm: Dracula does this when one of the zombies in human disguise impales another disguised zombie in the head.

Fantastic Racism: Between monsters and humans in the past, bad enough that monsters went into hiding as humans became more adept at killing them. Dracula perpetuates this attitude on the monster side into the present day; Johnny even points it out in the film. Averted at the end of the film and through to the sequel, where as it turns out, most humans are pretty chill about the idea of monsters existing, and thanks to Johnny, monsters are quite accepting of humans.

Fartillery: Frankenstein farts in the hotel lobby, putting the blame on Murray.

Fearless Fool: Jonathan. He seems to be fine with taking a picture of a couple that's crying, adventuring through a "spooky forest", and following a trail of zombies on fire to an "awesome castle". He is also seemingly completely unafraid of Dracula though this is because he thinks the hotel is having a costume party when he first shows up. And Jonathan is freaked out at first when he learns that all the monsters are real, plus Dracula is the real deal and not just a man in a costume and that Mavis is his daughter.

For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: At one point, Dracula and friends go out in public during the local Monster Festival. Eventually the humans realize they're the real deal, but everyone's starstruck instead of scared.

A witch uses a sponge to clean up a puddle in the lobby. Said sponge has a face with eyeballs and a mouth, and it makes happy noises as it absorbs a puddle of werewolf urine. Yes, a urophiliac sponge, in a kid's movie.

When Dracula is carrying Jonathan to the storage closet, squished between Drac and the backpack, Jonathan says something that sounds like "I can't f**king breathe under here." It's amazing how that one got past the radar, muffled though it was. Or he just said "It's kind of funky to breathe under here."

See Accidental Pervert. If that lady wasn't a skeleton, those scenes wouldn't have made it into the movie.

Jonathan asks Mavis if she's naked while she's in her bat form. In front of her dad, no less!

Two bed bugs, who only appear as small black specs on-screen, have reserved a regular-sized honeymoon suite that Drac and Jonathan accidentally stumble into and apologetically leave.

Being invisible, though it causes him much strife, allows Griffin to get away with doing things no family-rated movie would allow, actually. In fact, he’s a living, walking getting crap past the radar!

During the scene at the pool, Wayne pulls down Griffin's swimming trunks and blames it on his kids; Griffin gets completely embarrassed and says the pool water was cold when he got in before running off. If he wasn't invisible that scene would've been removed or altered.

There's also him powdering his butt later on, which ends up being one of the most suggestive things done by a guy who spends the entire movie virtually naked.

Dracula mentions people going "bat-poop" if they find out about Jonathan.

Headless Horseman / Stingy Jack: The cabby for the hotel turns out to be a monster that uses a greenish, detachable jack o'lantern instead of an actual head, driving a motorized carriage instead of a horse.

Hell Hotel: Subverted in the case of the titular hotel. While it is a hotel built with monsters in mind, it's a very cheerful place.

The Hero's Birthday: The plot starts when Dracula plans a big party for Mavis's 118th birthday. Mavis uses this to insist she's old enough to leave the castle and see the world.

Hidden Elf Village: Or Hidden Monster Hotel at any rate. The hotel was designed to be as difficult to find by humans as possible, being surrounded by a haunted forest and a graveyard. The building manager also tells Dracula to never start fires to avoid attracting attention. Jonathan ends up finding said hotel through local rumors and following Drac's flaming zombies.

High-Dive Hijinks: Frank uses the tentacle of a sea monster instead of a diving board, raising him several stories above the pool. When he hits the water, his detachable body parts come loose. Johnny tries the same thing later, but Dracula drains the water from the pool and puts a blob monster in Johnny's landing spot.

Dracula: You're old enough to drive a hearse now, you're old enough to make your own choices.

Housewife: Wayne's wife Wanda is perfectly happy to be a stay-at-home mom and just can't and won't stop having babies.

Humans Are Bastards: Dracula has developed this belief, even moreso than the other monsters, due to the traumatic experience of his wife being killed by a group of rioters setting his home on fire.

Humans Are the Real Monsters: Said word for word by Dracula. He hates them, and built the hotel not only to protect his daughter from them, but also as a place for other monsters to get away from humans. It ends up being subverted by the humans of the 21st century, but was played very straight by those of the 19th century who murdered Dracula's wife.

Hypnotic Eyes: Dracula can hypnotize anyone simply by staring into their eyes, allowing him to either control their actions or erase their memories. It works through windows, but apparently not contact lenses.

Knight Templar Parent: Dracula takes the whole Overprotective Dad thing so far that he not only teaches Mavis that humans are dangerous with scary bedtime stories and not letting her play outside, but he essentially imprisons her in an isolated castle for most of her life and the one time he lets her out he sets up a bad encounter with fake humans so she'll never want to leave again. Though this is not entirely without good reason, since Dracula knows from experiencewhat humans can do to vampires.

Kryptonite Factor: Both Dracula and Mavis are very vulnerable to sunlight, to the point that the touch of the smallest sliver of dawnlight on the tip of her shoes made Mavis yelp and pull back into the shade. More significant exposure causes Dracula to smoke and embers to appear on his bat-fur. Still, while painful, Dracula was able to spend a significant amount of time in the sun and healed within minutes of returning to the shade. Furthermore, even the slightest amount of shade seems sufficient to protect them, as Mavis was able to watch the sunrise from the shadow of the hotel's chimney without being burned.

Laser-Guided Amnesia: One of Dracula's powers. Jonathan's contacts block it, and he refuses to use it on Mavis, who wants to forget her heartbreak.

When Dracula's suits of armor attempt to subdue Quasimodo, he kicks one in the crotch, and it responds by doubling over in pain and then saying, "Why did that hurt me?"

Trying to back himself up on why "Jonnystein" isn't suitable for Mavis, Dracula says he has red, curly hair... to which Griffin asks defensively, "What's wrong with red, curly hair?" Well... the guy's invisible, so of course Draculanote or any other character for that matter is gonna point that out.

Jonathan says he had six brothers growing up, making him a seventh son.

Mayfly–December Romance: Mavis is just coming of age by vampire standards, but she's older than any living human and will long outlive Jonathan unless he becomes a vampire himself, which is never touched upon as a possibility.

Mood Killer: Averted. When Jonathan and Mavis are about to kiss near the end of the film, Dracula makes comically roars with red lighting. Shortly after he apologizes and leaves, letting them get to it.

Mundane Utility: Dracula and Mavis use their vampire powers for practical purposes, such as when Dracula uses telekinesis to change baby Mavis's diapers and Mavis uses her smaller bat form to thread a needle more easily.

Head 1: Hey, mister Dracula! We asked for a room with a view of the pool! Head 2: The room's fine! We just wanna book a massage. Head 3: Yeah! Swedish! Heads 4, 5 & 6:Shiatsu! Aromatherapy! Lower back!Dracula: I'll get back to you, Mr. Hydraberg! Head 1: See that you do! Head 2: I doubt it. Head 5:That's ''Miss'' Hydraberg!

Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Dracula tries to convince Mavis to stay away from the human world by setting up a fake human village for Mavis to visit where the townspeople (disguised zombies) will scare her out of wanting to go again. Though this works, the ruckus leads Jonathan to the hotel, and his upbeat outlook quickly changes her mind, forcing him to betray his ruse and further alienate her.

Esmeralda the rat can tell Johnnystein is a human by his scent, so Quasimodo uses her to track him down.

Exaggerated with Wayne's daughter Winnie, who with one sniff can not only determine Jonathan current location, but an impossibly precise sequence of events leading up to it (what time the plane Jonathan is on is leaving, the fact that he ordered the vegetarian meal, etc.).

Our Werewolves Are Different: Wayne and Wanda, a married werewolf couple with a titanic family of werewolf pups, and Wanda is pregnant forever with more and more. Also, and even odder, all appear to have no human form.

Paper-Thin Disguise: Jonathan's "Johnnystein" disguise is little more than blue body paint with fake stitches, an old coat, and a different hair style. But given that no one here has really seen a human, they wouldn't know the difference.

Parental Bonus: The Egyptian Queen character in several hotel scenes, and the human dressed as a mummy.

Puppy-Dog Eyes: Mavis tries this on Drac while in bat form. It doesn't work.

Dracula: Don't give me the pouty bat face.

The Quincy Punk: The werewolf pups have this look and similar bad behavior.

Race for Your Love: At the climax of the film, after Jonathan's identity is revealed, he rejects Mavis and leaves the hotel never to return, out of respect for Dracula's anti-human beliefs. Mavis is heartbroken and thinks her love is unrequited. However, Dracula changes his views about humans to the point that he chases after Jonathan himself, risking exposure to sunlight and even flying after Jonathan's airplane, all so he can bring them back together.

Sassy Black Woman: The shrunken head hanging on the hotel rooms, but particularly the one on Mavis's door.

Second-Act Breakup: Double Subverted. It at first seems like the revelation that Jonathan is human will break up him and Mavis, but she still loves him and wants to be with him. Then he tells her he hates monsters and leaves for Dracula's sake.

Seductive Mummy: Downplayed; the female mummy character does not look like an attractive woman by human standards, but she acts in a seductive way, and Murray has a crush on her.

Seven Minute Lull: Just as big D confesses to Mavis that he made up the town with the angry mob to scare her for her own safety.

She Cleans Up Nicely: Played with. Mavis wears her normal clothes to her birthday party, the only difference being a home-made Dracula cape. Jonathan is impressed and says she looks beautiful.

She Is All Grown Up: In the sense that Mavis at 118 is a young woman who wants her own life and to see the world.

Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: The only characters who appears in the first trailer are Dracula and Jonathan, though there's a quick shot of Murray leaving his pyramid, but that's it. As of the second trailer, the only character who still hasn't gotten a proper introduction is Quasimodo. He makes a brief appearance screaming "A human!" but his face can't be seen and his name isn't mentioned.

Sleep Cute: At the beginning of the scooter scene, as the characters are doing charades, front row center, a pink gill monster is resting against the bluish colored gillman who seemed to be drifting off to sleep.

Soft Water: Averted when Frank tries belly-flopping into a pool from several stories high.

And then there's "Problem (The Monster Remix)," which spoils the moment when Dracula sees Mavis kissing Jonathan for the first time on the dance floor.

One of the trailers also shows a brief clip of Dracula with an infant Mavis looking at a burning building in a serious manner. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out what happened with Mavis's mother from that.

Vegetarian Vampire: Neither Dracula or his daughter drink human blood because, as stated by Dracula, it's too fatty and you don't know where the human's been. Instead their meals apparently consist of small critters like mice, scorpions, worms, etc., as well as a blood substitute such as Near-Blood and Blood Beaters. This is actually more accurate to the behavior of real vampire bats, who generally avoid human blood. Dracula does, however, try to scare Jonathan away from the hotel by threatening to drink him dry. At the end of the movie though, he does admit to Mavis that he would have if Johnny didn't pretend to hate monsters.

Visible Invisibility: Type 5 with Griffin, he's the only one who can see himself and uses glasses so others can "see" him.

Vomit Indiscretion Shot: A Fly Man does this twice; once during a game of charades and again during a water aerobics class. Both times he has to tell people not to interpret it or copy it.

Walking the Earth: Jonathan was backpacking across Europe before he came to the hotel. Judging from the patches on his backpack, he's been to France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Romania and Mexico. He also says that everything he owns is in that backpack.

Wall Crawl: Mavis simply walks up the wall and onto the ceiling while pacing around her room. She does it literally as a baby, though.

Wham Shot: When Dracula says "the legend is wrong" and pulls the curtain away, revealing him in the picture with his wife, the Lady Lubov, it's a big reveal that explains a lot.

What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Quasimodo can be considered a "monster" because of his mannerisms and being perceived as a monster by regular humans. After all, if a no-humans rule was fully in effect, Griffin technically wouldn't be allowed on the premise either.

What the Hell, Hero?: In order to keep Mavis from leaving the hotel, Dracula builds a fake human village for her to visit and has zombies in human costumes attack her with pitchforks and torches. Despite some stylistic suck from the zombies' incompetence, the plan works, but Dracula eventually confesses everything to Mavis during her birthday party. She is understandably pissed. Everybody helps her to confront him about it, even before Johnny is revealed to be a human and their sentiments really sour.

Weirdness Censor: Subverted. all the people in the Halloween festival during the third act are aware that Frankenstein is real and think he is just awesome. Dracula too, although one ask for some proof

Won't Take "Yes" for an Answer: Mavis has a whole speech prepared why Dracula should give her permission to go outside. When he says yes, she goes off into the speech before realizing he already gave her permission.

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